Took a trip to London on Tuesday night to catch up with some friends, and, on the train journey there and back, I managed to read James D G Dunn’s “A New Perspective on Jesus”. (It’s a short book that fitted into my jacket pocket…)<\/p>\n
I thought it was excellent<\/b>. It goes through the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ and skewers some liberal assumptions about the nature of the tradition, and gives a straightforward account of how the oral tradition would have functioned. The book is really a short summary of his longer book, “Jesus Remembered”, which I guess I’ll now have to read. Not for beginners in New Testament studies, I wouldn’t have said, but if you know what ‘form criticism’ or ‘Q’ refer to, then you’ll be fine.<\/p>\n
It turns out that Dunn was the person who coined the phrase ‘A new perspective on Paul’, referring to the post-Sanders revolution in how to understand the Apostle, which I had always associated with Tom Wright (coming to a Learning Church near you in the autumn ;-). I hope Dunn makes a similar impact with his work here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Took a trip to London on Tuesday night to catch up with some friends, and, on the train journey there and back, I managed to read James D G Dunn’s “A New Perspective on Jesus”. (It’s a short book that … Continue reading